Mizoguchi did Sisters of the Gion the same year as Osaka Elegy, but it looks like a very different movie. It has the same compression of story I noticed in the other two Mizoguchi films I’ve seen, and there’s the same theme of women’s lives being hard because of men, but the camera here is different from how it is in Osaka Elegy.
This film has the mobile camera of Ugetsu. The camera follows characters down alleys in Kyoto and moves around the room during conversations as characters do. It greets people as they enter a room. It follows people from one room into another. Like in all the Mizoguchi films, the shots in Sisters of the Gion are long, but this film has the camera mobility that Osaka Elegy lacks and that makes that film slow.
In fact, Sisters of the Gion is generally more cinematic than Osaka Elegy. The film opens with a long take of an estate auction as the camera slowly pans right, from auction background to auctioneer to bidders to consignors. This long take introduces us to the situation of Furusawa, the patron of one of the titular sisters, Umekichi. He’s bankrupt, and this single take establishes that situation and segues seamlessly into the background that will underlie one of the main storylines. It’s great cinema. Another interesting cinema moment occurs when the injured Omocha is brought into her home. The camera follows her slow progress out of one room and across another until it stops when she goes behind a screen. At that point, the camera lingers on the screen as we hear the conversation going on behind it. With this scene, I can imagine Mizoguchi working out how to use the new cinema element of sound with his preferred cinema expression of long takes. It works in this situation.
Sisters of the Gion is also a transition from the silent-inspired melodrama of Osaka Elegy into a more realistic aesthetic. Sisters of the Gion is a modern story of modern women trying to make their way in a hard social situation. There are brutally-honest elements like poverty, prostitution and violence, and the harsh ending of the film – realist Omocha and romantic Umekichi both broken by men – is far too gut-kicking for melodrama. The pain here is visceral and powerful.
It interesting that Mizoguchi could do Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion in the same year, using many elements of the same cinema language to explore a similar theme, and yet he produced such different films. His more complex cinema language here and his more realistic approach to the theme makes Sisters of Gion a film that a modern audience can respond to more strongly.
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